Chapter 5 School Times Part 2

Since when the hell have I looked like this?

Was it before or after the portal? During the initiation? Was it while I was in the infirmary?

Fuck!

SHATTER!

Blinking my eyes I quickly pulled myself back into reality as I found myself sitting at the cafeteria once more, in my hands sat a familiar-no sorry what sat was the remnants of a glass cup I had just been using to hold and drink my bottle of tropical juice I had grabbed from the buffet.

"Whoa, good thing your arms are made out of metal or that would've hurt." Hearing yang joke my head turned to the blonde that sat across from me as she had an amused grin plastered on her face clearly enjoying my absentmindedness to a great extent.

"Yang leave him alone." Ruby quickly whined as she was quick to help me clean up my mess, something I was quick to join in as it was my fault I made the mess.

"Are you good for today?" Blake asked, it was clear she wasn't asking for the sake of being nice but she was more curious than anything else.

"Yeah I should be fine, not like anyone is going to straight up call on a guy who just got out of the infirmary." I said as I figured whoever did that was clearly being a dick or something of the like.

"Yeah I get what you mean but hey good news today's the first day for combat class, I can now get some much needed aggression out of my system." Yang eagerly exclaimed, clearly she was ready if the yellow flecks of what I think are embers coming off her hair said anything.

"Well I'm more excited for Weapon engineering class, I've wanted to work in the school forge for a week." Ruby said as I raised an eyebrow in curiosity.

"Why didn't you go earlier?" I asked as the two of us finished cleaning my mess of juice and glass.

"Cause I wasn't allowed until school introduction was over, now that its over we can now take classes we chose, I took Weapon engineering." Ruby explained.

"I took Gym class." Yang jumped in, raising her arm and showing off her bicep, which I would've seen if not for her uniform sleeve getting in the way.

"I took Literature studies." Blake spoke in between eating her meal.

"And I've got…?" Looking at my newly given scroll I looked at my schedule and raised an eyebrow at the given class I had been given seeing as I was never asked what class I wanted. "Dustology with Professor Peach?"

"Ooo you're lucky you got one of the absent teachers." Yang said with a mock jealous tone.

"Absent? The hell do you mean by absent?" I asked, what is this class just perpetually taught by a Sub or something?

"We talked to some second years and they say Professor Peach is one of the few teachers that doesn't turn up to their classes" Blake explained while I blinked in surprise.

"If that's so then why the hell do they keep her class around?" I wondered, confused as to why this shit was able to be kept around if there was no teacher around or better yet why not just replace the teacher entirely.

"They never told us, just said if you're lucky to end up in it you shouldn't complain about it." Ruby said with a nondescript shrug. "Oh we are going to be late, we should get going."

seeing the time I let out a tired sigh but nodded in understanding as I had finished my food a minute ago.

"So, Grimm studies?" I asked, seeing that it was our first official class of the day.

"Oh you are going to love Grimm studies." Yang's smirk was rather large, a near grin as she was loosely amused at the future class while she walked away from the table.

"The hell is she smirking about? I asked Blake, she just shrugged before quickly following her partner.

"Come on, we don't wanna be late, not like how we were last week." Ruby said as I raised my eyebrow as I remembered how she told me about how our team and JNPR were actually late to class.

Letting out a tired sigh I just hoped this class would at the very least be interesting.

Nevermind it's not interesting whatsoever, the amount of my fellow students with their heads on the lecture desks sleeping was staggering to say the least.

I counted up to four, five… seven? Yeah sure seven out of the entire class that were wide awake or well half of them were, the other half were just half-make that four, four of us are awake.

I was happy to say at the very least that I slept fine, my fear of Ruby's bunk dropping was an interesting fear but I admit I had scarier things that could or better yet would have kept me up.

I slept like a log until I was forced to wake up.

Back to the class though… god this guy is still going.

"-and that class is how I rode a beowolf into a herd of Minos, but little did I know I was then kidnapped by the Ilumina-"

I could tell this guys stories were interesting but his tone was so dull and I had to force myself to stay awake, fortunately my partner was one of the other few people that was wide awake.

Looking to my side I found my attention drawn towards Ruby's note tak-no sorry those are doodles… amusing doodles I can at the very least admit that.

"Professor Poop?" I whispered, catching Ruby's attention her head quickly turned to look up at me.

"Hehehe sorry." Ruby awkwardly chuckled as I got a better look at one of her doodles, it was a clear parody of Professor Port, the guy who was putting everyone to sleep, he was now sporting a bigger rounder body and had little squiggles I had quickly deduced were stick lines to show his new title/name wasn't just for giggles.

Amusing.

Looking back up at the professor or to be exact his black board I saw bits and pieces of information written down as well as rather detailed looking sketches of differing… Grimm, something I will need to grow accustomed to quickly by the looks of it.

I was half tempted to do some more further research into Grimm with my scroll but after learning a rather brief history from this worlds equivalent to TikTok/YoutubeShorts(it was one of the few ways I could digest some of this new information) I figured being taught about it from an actual teacher would do me some good.

…

…

…

Ok fine in reality I procrastinated looking up Grimm for more brain rotting videos… it was all awful but not so awful that it made me stop watching more of it.

God, even Nevada had a better entertainment setting than this place… then again it was mainly death shows and the occasional cooking show to break up the monotony of death and the guts of it all.

But shit it was entertaining enough.

Where was I going with this?

"Ahem!" Hearing Port, yeah that's his name, everyone seemed to wake almost immediately and turned their attention to the teacher. "So after such a fine tale I believe it is time to stretch the old muscles and seeing as we technically have a new student with us Mr Wine can you please get changed and make yourself over to the middle of the front of the class."

Blinking in confusion I quickly realised that Port was addressing me… since was my name fucking Wine?

Shaking my head I quietly removed my blazer and just rolled my sleeves up revealing my black metal prosthesis'.

Jumping over my desk and into the middle of the front of the classroom.

"I don't need to change." I said readjusting my gloves before going to the back of my waist and pulled out my Glock, with the way Port just chuckled told me he wasn't surprised but to be honest I wasn't even certain was going on until I finally noticed the giant rattling cage on the other end of the classroom.

"Has that thing been there the whole time?" I mumbled in confusion before disengaging the safety and then pulled the slide back.

With a nice clean click I knew I had a fresh round in the chamber, something though seemed to make Port chuckle in a rather loud and boisterous fashion.

"Good good, better to be prepared to fight than not as I always say!" Port loudly exclaimed, slamming his large axe blunderbus against the cage's gate causing it to finally open up.

in a black blur I watched and without a second thought I quickly jumped up and flipped myself right over the black blur my eyes narrowed as I felt something was off.

Landing back onto my feet I turned to face my opponent and blinked when it turned out to be one of those werewolves I had seen when I woke up in the forest.

"Well, let's see what's going on with me." I muttered under my breath as the werewolf turned around and charged at me.

seeing the wide swinging swipes of their claws my body had quickly moved to dodge them, the swings were slow that much I could tell but there was this weird disconnect I was getting between my dodges.

"Jackson!" Hearing the cry I quickly pulled my fist up, landing a heavy uppercut or well just heavy for the werewolf to stagger backwards.

"Beowolves are pack hunters but they are easier to deal with one on one!" Hearing Ruby's advice I simply shrugged as my attention was less on the "beowolf" but more on myself.

Looking at my left prosthetic my eyes moved back to the beowolf and found myself rather eager in testing this disconnect I was feeling.

But I'll deal with that later.

Pulling my gun up though I quickly shot at the beowolves leg and I watched in mild interest as the 9x19mm seemingly forced the monster to drop down onto a knee.

"Well that's interesting." I mumbled quickly putting my gun's safety back on. I quickly holstered it back unto the back of my waist as I now had another new thing to experiment with.

Probanot the best time to do so as I had a lot to figure out, but hey I'm curious.

Lunging forwards the beowolf seemingly charged forwards to meet the challenge, their claws ready to dig into me but I didn't allow that to happen as my hands flew up and latched onto the bottom and top jaw of their head and with a twisted grin hidden under my bandana I pulled with full force.

The sound of flesh being ripped and bones cracking under my prosthetics echoed throughout the classroom as the beowolves carcass dropped to the ground in two halves.

"Well that was quite the show." I heard port loudly exclaim as I slowly turned to look back up at the rest of the class as I saw everyone was now wide awake and staring at me with varying degrees of shock and by the looks of Jaune straight horror inducing terror.

Ring!

Hearing the bell go off my eyes turned back to Port as he was quick to dismiss the class while handing a variation of homework, something I didn't find myself doing regardless if I needed to or not.

Moving over to my dropped coat I quietly threw it on before I saw Ruby giddly bouncing over to see me while the rest of our team silently slinked away heading outside of the classroom.

"Wow that was brutal, did you really have to go that far?" Ruby exclaimed as I her tone betrayed her entire question as she sounded rather giddy, her eyes were wide open and that smile threw me for a second as if I had seen that exact smile before, but for obvious reasons it kinda alluded me as to where I saw it before.

"Something was off with my prosthetics, I wanted to test something." I explained as it was true something was off, almost like there was a lag of sorts, I was uncertain of it but I needed to test it more to make sure if this was true or not.

"Oh do you need to see the Nurse then?" Ruby quickly asked, quickly I shook my head and directed her to guide me out of the classroom and towards the next lesson.

"I'm good, little concerned though seeing as I am not exactly a history kinda guy." I explained, it was lie as I did have an interest in history but that was mainly because of guns, general hijinx and sometimes a little bit of curiosity and such.

But it didn't always stick just as well as Warhammer lore did to an extent, now I need to know if this place has a variant of Warhammer here or not, Nevada didn't but that was because it was a world filled with their own Grimdark Bullshit.

"Hope you're ready cause Professor Oobleck is a little hard to understand at times." Ruby warned.

"Please I speak in the majority of grunts, I think I can handle it." I said with a casual confidence, something that I usually don't have but I had a feeling I could handle it.

45 minutes later

"Ok nevermind I can't understand him for shit."

"Mr Wine, while I appreciate that you have finally healed enough to attend classes I ask that you please keep such crass language outside of my classroom." Profess-Doctor Oobleck quickly spoke out as he had paused in his tirade of a lesson just to reprimand me.

something I heard Yang snickering as she had quietly sat right next to me, obviously amused at me being called out in the middle of less.

"Sorry, Doctor I didn't mean any offence, it's just your lesson plan is… rather advanced for someone like me." I quickly spoke before giving the blonde next to me a quick elbow jab to their arm.

"While I do understand your predicament I would advise you to put some trust in me for what I am teaching not only you but the entire class the basics of history, the building blocks to how society was created," Oobleck seemed to pause as he stared upwards. "Both from the positive and negative sides, but with it I believe you will all learn that with this fundamental knowledge-"

Great I think I set off the good Doctor, geez it's like Ruby but instead of impassioned ranting of weapon cleaning and maintenance it was history.

shit just encase, I decided to ask a rather important question.

"Does he do this all the time?" Turning to Yang she just smirked before giving a rather uncaring shrug.

"He gave us the same speech on our second day." Yang explained as I just nodded in understanding.

Great… so this place is filled with a variety of interesting teacher characters.

"Great now we just need a bondage artist and we'll have us quite the shonen anime trope shit show." I muttered as my eyes darted around as I knew we already had the bullying jock posse formed, the popular girl, the childhood friends who have the will there they won't they thing going on, the semi incompetent blonde and no I am not talking about Yang, the dark broody teenager who seemingly has a dark but shocking backstory(not like I was calling myself out but come on Blake).

And what else did we have?

…

…

…

looking at Yang and Ruby more specifically I promptly decided to not to go any further into thinking about it.

"Uh fuck it I don't give a shit."

"Mr Wine-!"

Shit!

3rd period

After class our third period and that's where I quickly found myself walking into a class by myself, seeing as this was personal classes teams/partners were semi uncommon to be ending up in the same class.

Hence while I was slowly walking into the classroom I was semi surprised to see that room was very reminiscent of that of a science class room with various large work bench desks sitting around and a large board at the front of the room.

My limited knowledge on Dust quickly became apparent as I slowly found myself sitting at the back by myself while I slowly watched the room slowly be filled with my fellow students, each one holding some books that I quickly assumed had something to do with this class's whole curriculum.

Pulling out my scroll I began looking up random searches of "how to dust for dummies" the irony was that my search barred a lot of fruit so I quickly opened the first link and I quickly skimmed through the information and I got the basic's and by basic's I mean I got the kindergarten basic.

Dust is used for everything… The limit of one fuel source has forced the world to ignore most other forms of energies other than the basic ones such as water turbines, wind, charcoal and geothermal, quite a bit but they clearly ignored wind turbines, solar and other more detailed variants of energy sources.

Then there were the Variants of dust itself being from the simplistic to the more exotic like Acidic dust or Burn dust or hard light dust.

Hardlight caught my attention but as soon as I saw it was kind of soft locked to the Atlas military quickly put a damper on my interest, but quickly my eyes turned back to a type of dust that had my undivided attention.

Gravity.

Flipping through the various uses of Gravity dust I was more or less hooked at the idea of a dust that was as versatile as Gravity dust.

Used in Hover technology this Dust was cool as it was pretty much the embodiment of force itself, the recoil of rounds from using Gravity dust was shockingly awesome and if not carefully mixed correctly could destroy most weapons that weren't built to hand the force of pure gravity shooting out of their weapons.

The pictures and thumbnails of Gravity dust fails were in the hundreds of thousands as I found myself scratching my chin in interest. the likeliness that my weapons could handle Gravity dust was unlikely but my prosthetic themselves'.

Looking at my gloved hand I was reminded of the initiation where with Overclocking mode I could dislocate/destroy a giant armoured scorpion's claw with a full on punch imagine if I put gravity dust into the mix.

Suddenly the door to the classroom opened and I quickly turned my scroll off and watched as a woman wearing a peach pink lab coat walked right into the middle of the class.

"Hello student apologies for being twenty five minutes late. My attention was pulled away for some time and with it I am unfortunately not going to be here tomorrow." The woman exclaimed, the information seemingly caused everyone but me to let out tired and annoyed moans.

"I understand the displeasure but let us not dwell on tomorrow's problems and let's focus on today's challenges." The woman, no i guess Ms Peach quickly picked up a piece of chalk and started writing down something on the blackboard. "Alright today I will teach you about Magical Circles and yes that is the Official terminology but for this class we will for now refer to them as Personal Ritual Circles or PRC's for quick abbreviation."

Hearing this my attention was quickly pulled as I tried to focus on the blackboard itself as Ms Peach wrote a couple sentences on the board before quickly shifting from writing to straight drawing.

"PRC's are a Huntsmen and Huntresses best friend if they wish to start branching into the Dustmancy Category or to be even more exact Dust Alchemy which is a topic that you will be taught later into the year but for now we will focus today's lesson on PRC's, what they do, what they can do and most importantly creating your own PRC." As the information was presented I couldn't help but frown.

I wasn't frowning in annoyance or general confusion but frowning in curiosity as to what PRC was, I mean Magic Circle was a good basic but by the way the teacher went about it there was a clear distinction to this specific topic.

"Tomorrow while I am away Professor Goodwitch will take over as she can best handle the topic of PRC's personally." The news seemed to cause a new chorus of groans from everyone while I just shrugged, I mean I didn't know who Goodwitch was exactly but with the way everyone was groaning she must be quite the mental handful.

"Alright enough of that and let's get back to the lesson." Ms Peach exclaimed, pulling everyone back into the lesson quickly.

While the lesson continued I at the very least understood the premise of PRC's but I think I got it exactly just yet.

Well at least I'm interested to an extent.

Lunch + Free Period

"So how was nerd class?" Was the first question I got as I sat myself down at the table that held my team.

Yang being the one to initiate the conversation wasn't much of a surprise as I noted how her tone from yesterday shifted from 'ready to kill when needed' to a more 'I'm going to tease you' fashion.

Something I never really took an interest in even as we ate earlier at breakfast.

"Nerd class is a bit much but I'm trying to get it." I exclaimed watching how Yang just smirked in light amusement.

"That's good to hear, my class was awesome, the forge is like a dream come true." Ruby quickly spoke up as she began to brag about how cool her class was while I nodded along not truly paying attention as I dug into my food.

While I ate though I slowly started to twitch my fingers and my legs every now and a again between bites, it wasn't a tick or something I was more or less testing my own prosthesis, the first class was still in the back of my mind as I tried to figure out a reason for this unease of lag I had been feeling.

The twitches revealed the lag was there but it was small, not like microseconds but I'd say a fraction of a second was a good basis for what I was feeling.

Shit if I was an Astartes I'd say that this was something to be absolutely concerned about but my intuition told me that this lag wasn't too serious, more like I needed to do an adjustment of sorts to myself.

"Jackson you there?" hearing the question my head snapped up to my left as i saw Ruby was looking at me with concern. "You alright, you spacing out there for a while there."

"Yeah it was almost scary in a way." Yang continued to tease but I could hear something in her tone that told me she was in a fashion concerned which was strange but I chose to ignore it and the worry I was presented with a small shrug.

"I'm fine just spacing out, nothing to really be concerned about." I said watching how my partner just frowned but quickly shifted her expression to that of the bright girl she was.

"That's good, I'm going to have to go to my next class after lunch though, it's a leader's only class, something that's kinda mandatory for every leader in school." Ruby explained as I nodded in understanding.

"Try not to fall asleep in class." I said as I gave the small girl a rare but light shove to her shoulder, I was forced to be cautious with my interactions with everyone but thankfully the light shove just made the younger girl tip over a bit before righting herself back up.

her smile quickly shifted to that of an annoyed pout, quickly I was reminded of an annoyed younger sister from an anime with how she looked but quickly as I thought about it I just pushed that thought to the side, not like I was going to be finding anything like anime in this damn place.

Cartoons was something I was quick to recognize, but Anime or something similar was both in the category of few and non-existent in this place.

It was rather sad to say the least.

I mean Nevada was in the same boat but then again I was probably more focused on survival over looking for entertainment that could potentially distract me from my nightmares or my shit filled life of live die and repeat.

"So what is everyone planning on doing during their free period?" Ruby asked, the question pulled me back out of my head as I bit my lip in thought.

"Well I'm going to do some stretches and check out the rest of the school, just going to prepare myself for Combat class after free period." Yang exclaimed as she was quite clear that she was going to chill out and wait for what I assumed was the punching and kicking of a lifetime.

"I'm going to go to the library and study some homework my class gave me." Blake answered speaking for the first time in the whole while, almost forgot she was there if not for her slow but clear movements to eat her lunch or turning the page of the book she was currently reading… I think that was her third book or something.

Everyone seemed to turn to look at me as I just shrugged, not like I had a clear idea of what I wanted to do during free period but suddenly the last class's Topic popped into my head.

"I'm gonna go back to the dorm and do a little studying on PRC's" I said with a shrug watching how everyone just nodded, well Blake and Ruby did but Yang just stared at me with wide eyes.

"Really PRC's? But aren't you a frontline fighter?" Yang questioned as I paused but quickly remembered that PRC users were technically support or long range types and I guess the initiation revealed to her that I was more of a frontline fighter.

"Shocking as it seems I'm actually a variant fighter, I only get in close when I'm forced hence why I have a sword but two guns." I explained deciding to not mention the throwing ordinance I had in my pack as I completely forgot to use them earlier during the initiation. "I was forced to learn how to fight between a good distance and face to face."

"Wow… well you definitely fooled us and here I thought you were just a crazed adrenaline junkie." The tilt of my head must've caught Yang's attention as she just stared back at me in a rather blank fashion. "Uh Grimm Studies? Remember how you literally tore that beowolf in half?"

"…Oooooh, yeah I get what you mean… Guess I'm a more complicated, not so one dimensional person." I sarcastically said at the end.

"Could've fooled us." Blake quipped, something that shocked me but instead I just took the full brunt of the sarcastic comment.

"Well at least I know I'm loved." I said going back to my food only to notice that it was all gone, must've eaten it all damn.

Meanwhile I heard Ruby simply chuckle, quite clearly amused by our rather small antics, something that I was quick to believe was going to be an occurring event.

letting out a tired a leaned my head back and stared at the ceiling and wondered.

Was this really my life now?

Chapter 5 end

Jericho: well at least we can say you're a C student now get back to work… popcorn tastes better with some misery. I don't know why. Did you not hear me get back to work

Amvmaster: You are a worry, you know that?